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Honestly I think this makes a lot more sense than Twitter. It always felt wrong to me that Twitter was used for anything resembling official communication. Whet

Honestly I think this makes a lot more sense than Twitter. It always felt wrong to me that Twitter was used for anything resembling official communication. Whether it be a local news network, fire station, local government or the president of the United States. All on the same platform that is filled to the brim with pornography and obscenities. Of course you can curate your feed and only follow what you want, but in my mind Twitter is a single website. I'm used to dedicated forums so when Twitter rolled around I figured it would just be a little bit bigger, but still mostly informal, unofficial people goofing off online. Once everyone and everything started using it I left. I don't want to mix online identities with real life identities. So, despite Mastodon being a federated system it makes a lot more sense to use a dedicated instance for official purposes like this to me. I imagine they don't federate with anything anyway and don't even allow account creation.

andsoitis 3y ago
Why not just use a website? What advantage do citizens get by going to a social media site to keep a pulse on govt comms?
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Mastodon can be both a website and a federated microblogging platform.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    My thinking is: governments already have a website. So now you’re asking citizens to go to two different places to seek out information instead of one. Or worse: now the government feels they need to post on: their own website, Twitter, threads, Facebook, mastodon, etc.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      They already do. Government has found it easier to go where the people are than to try to lead the people to water they won’t drink.
      - gochi 3y ago
        Exactly. So there is no added benefit to this beyond the usual methods of government officials making accounts on every network. Negating the entire original comment about how this "makes more sense than Twitter".
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        Twitter was rate limiting people and those people affected could not see government posts if they exceeded their quota. So in that strict sense it is quite reasonable. Several government entities where I am left after the blue checkmark fiascos meant people were trying to impersonate the official accounts.
        gochi 3y ago
        None of this is exclusive to Mastodon. They could have done the same on Facebook or any other network that isn't federated.
        SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
        "They could have done the same on Facebook or any other network that they don't control and can't rely on" They can however control a Mastodon instance, and starting one is a off-the-shelf operation now. Another poster described it as "problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out" which is exactly right. Those other platforms might have decided today not to show you the emergency warning unless you have an account and are logged in and have watched some ads first. It is - for good reason - conventional wisdom that in order to get a message out thoroughly, you have "outposts" on _all_ the media that you don't own (including Facebook and twitter) and push content to there, but the "home base" is not on some platform where it can be locked, rate-limited or taken from you at the whim of some other company in some other country.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      People go to a gov website when they know they need to get information or get something done. Social media is a way to push information out about new policies etc. Governments have whole departments dedicated to getting the word out about things because people aren't all in one place. This is not a big additional effort but it is different in two essential way: They control it, and it has APIs anyone can connect to, including to bridge elsewhere.
    - bob-09 3y ago
      You can ask citizens to go to your website to stay informed, but they will turn around and complain that nobody told them about X,Y,Z because they're not naturally going to the website on a regular basis unless they have an immediate need. Elected officials will turn on you and blame you for not meeting the citizens where they already are.
      - WeylandYutani 3y ago
        Public broadcasting exists in Europe. In fact they were established precisely for this purpose all the way back before internet in the 1930s. Really you don't need Twitter to stay informed- very few people actually follow government tweets and most of them are journalists.
    - FireInsight 3y ago
      Well, usually governments don't just have one website. Different entities use different channels for official communications + Twitter which is the one everyone reads. Why not have a governments official mastodon for the governments official communication interoperable with the network everyone else is on?
    - tremon 3y ago
      Why can't the government website not have a widget/subpage showing the latest Mastodon posts?
- izzydata 3y ago
  If I had to guess it is because it is already developed, in a format people can already understand and is dynamically configurable to do what they want now and could change in the future.
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  Think of it like RSS, but for tiny updates. You'd visit the site to do website type of things, but you don't want to visit daily in case there's an update.
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  Hosting mastodon instances costs money. It makes sense that the "digital town square" is at least partially funded and maintained by the public, i.e. the government.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    Commodity small mastodon instance hosting is modestly priced, compared to large org budgets https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
- cmelbye 3y ago
  The advantage is that the information can be aggregated along with posts from other sources rather than having to visit many different websites individually. It's easier to consume, the same reason why RSS was useful.
  - gochi 3y ago
    This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are constantly splitting themselves around different social networks. So this just becomes "if you're a twitter user it's easier than RSS". Yet you still have to create another account to join the fediverse, then another for threads, then another for facebook, list goes on for each network that pops up and gains usage.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      There is also RSS. https://www.government.nl/rss https://www.government.nl/rss Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. It has to be “all of the above” because no one method of distribution captures everybody
      - andsoitis 3y ago
        > Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. I can agree with that. Interesting to see social network reach in the Netherlands: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-networks-netherlands/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-n... Meta rules the top 4 spots.
    - cmelbye 3y ago
      That’s the hard part about standards. I’m not sure how a standard can become one without people taking a chance on it. Case in point: You actually do not need to create another account on Threads - it interoperates with this standard. Citizens will be able to follow information from the Dutch government on that platform.
      - gochi 3y ago
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  It's just an alternate implementation of RSS / push notifications / etc. A "twitter feed" is just a website and propagation of posts, comments to posts, etc. Right?
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Yeah and you can implement ActivityPub without using Mastodon, if they want to. So you could have something that looks more like WordPress (or actually is, but hopefully not), but is compatible with the "fediverse" ecosystem. And RSS, of course
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  If you publish on a website, discussion about what you posted happens in a fragmented way across the various social sites (like we're doing here). If you publish on a social site you're saying "let's talk about this here". Conversations about what you posted might spring up elsewhere, but they become secondary. That's desirable if you want to have a moment when you're done addressing all of the comments.
- vanilla_nut 3y ago
  No strong reason, but Mastodon allows various goverment officials and agencies to create accounts on the same server and probably has more functionality baked in than most self-hosted alternatives. It's got a better interface than a CMS and even allows those government officials to follow and interact with other accounts in an official capacity. Personally it feels ready-made for government presence on the web.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Wordpress for one to many.
    - heavenlyblue 3y ago
      How would your average user "follow" several wordpress websites aggregated in a single timeline?
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        RSS? I imagine ActivityPub is the Mastodon analogy.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Very few people are going to bother going to the Dutch government's website every day to see what's going on with the Dutch government. They might be sufficiently interested to follow an account or two. I follow a couple of the European Commission's accounts (they also have a Mastodon instance), and occasionally find them interesting; I certainly can't see myself regularly going to the EC's horrible website, tho.
  - hidelooktropic 3y ago
    Yes. And very few still are going to adopt RSS software and a life workflow to check it only to approximate the aggregation feature already a first class feature of a social media platform. Let's remember the general public are not the same users as "us"
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Yes, a website with an RSS feed is the most basic thing the government should use for communication. This also avoids the question of who to peer with. Anyone can request the RSS feed.
  - DavideNL 3y ago
    Mastodon also provides an rss feed. “You can follow any Mastodon account via RSS by just adding ".rss" to the end of the account's public profile URL.” https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456 https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
- DavideNL 3y ago
  It _is_ also a website, hosted by themselves: https://social.overheid.nl/public/local https://social.overheid.nl/public/local
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  Mastodon is a website, which is well-suited for discussion and broadcasting. Yes you could create a website and often the agencies do also that - for presenting more static information. But Mastodon etc. already solve the problem of discussion and "following" some specific party or "thread". A conventional web-site is good for distributing static information whereas a social media site is good for broadcasting notifications about CHANGES to that (more static) information.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  what is a mastodon instance if not "a website"?
- rakoo 3y ago
  Same as tv vs social networks: communication can be bidirectional, and a specific news can be shared and discussed more easily
- hidelooktropic 3y ago
  What advantage do citizens get by needing to know and personally keep the individual websites for their govt comms Or rely on each website to format the messages in consistently good UX, typography, etc. Or lose the ability to discover those updates through social network concepts like hashtags Or have to employ their own RSS tools and subscriptions to approximate the aggregation already baked into mastodon et al Or remove the ability to see conversations between government entities natively supported by @ mentions.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  I am not going to go to 41 different government agency websites every day just to see if they want to tell me something important. But I will follow them on social media so that I can see all their updates in one place.
vidarh 3y ago
You can see from the fact that there are replies from other instances that they do federate. It'd make little sense not to, as if they didn't people wouldn't be able to follow them.
- seti0Cha 3y ago
  Do they federate with anybody or are they selective? Who makes those decisions, based on what? This seems like a can of worms to me.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I'm not sure which part of federation it is that makes you think there's a reason for them to be selective. The "worst case" scenario is that people on this instance can follow someone undesirable and so that they end up with undesirable content in the local feed. But that's pretty much down to ensuring users act how they otherwise would on any social media, with the expectation it will be seen by the public. I'm a bit surprised that they allow public access to the federated view of the server [1], because that does mean it potentially could get embarrassing w/respect to people who don't get that the gov. doesn't choose what ends up there, so I'd bet that eventually ends up locked down. [1] https://social.overheid.nl/public https://social.overheid.nl/public
    - seti0Cha 3y ago
      That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take.
      - nobody9999 3y ago
        >That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take. I'm not clear on what you mean by "forced to choose which side to take." You (or anyone else) don't have to have an account on that instance. In fact IIUC, the site linked in the submission only has accounts for the Dutch government and elected officials of that government. Folks other than that can follow individual accounts on the Dutch government instance, but aren't subject to any moderation decisions made by the site. Only those with accounts on that instance would be affected by blocks/bans of specific users or instances. And even if the Dutch government instance wants to block other instances from their users, there's nothing stopping Dutch government officials (and/or agencies) from creating accounts on other instances. As such, please explain what you mean by "choosing a side." I'd expect that this site is on the side of The Netherlands, its government and citizens. Isn't that the way it should be for a site like this? As such, please explain what you mean. Edit: Clarified prose. Fixed typo.
callalex 3y ago
It terrifies me how many USA cities and counties use Twitter for their mass emergency broadcasts, since Twitter has now proven itself to be unreliable for even reads. My city pays a company (Nixle) to send out mass SMS and Email, but all it contains is a link to a tweet instead of any actionable information.
- RF_Savage 3y ago
  That must have been frustrating when twitter went behind a login wall.
stainablesteel 3y ago
> It always felt wrong to me that Twitter was used for anything resembling official communication i've come to disagree with this now that community notes have come into play, it makes twitter the best place for them to communicate if they're trying to show their honesty and sincerity

andsoitis 3y ago

Why not just use a website? What advantage do citizens get by going to a social media site to keep a pulse on govt comms?

bloopernova 3y ago
Mastodon can be both a website and a federated microblogging platform.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  My thinking is: governments already have a website. So now you’re asking citizens to go to two different places to seek out information instead of one. Or worse: now the government feels they need to post on: their own website, Twitter, threads, Facebook, mastodon, etc.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    They already do. Government has found it easier to go where the people are than to try to lead the people to water they won’t drink.
    - gochi 3y ago
      Exactly. So there is no added benefit to this beyond the usual methods of government officials making accounts on every network. Negating the entire original comment about how this "makes more sense than Twitter".
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        Twitter was rate limiting people and those people affected could not see government posts if they exceeded their quota. So in that strict sense it is quite reasonable. Several government entities where I am left after the blue checkmark fiascos meant people were trying to impersonate the official accounts.
        gochi 3y ago
        None of this is exclusive to Mastodon. They could have done the same on Facebook or any other network that isn't federated.
        SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
        "They could have done the same on Facebook or any other network that they don't control and can't rely on" They can however control a Mastodon instance, and starting one is a off-the-shelf operation now. Another poster described it as "problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out" which is exactly right. Those other platforms might have decided today not to show you the emergency warning unless you have an account and are logged in and have watched some ads first. It is - for good reason - conventional wisdom that in order to get a message out thoroughly, you have "outposts" on _all_ the media that you don't own (including Facebook and twitter) and push content to there, but the "home base" is not on some platform where it can be locked, rate-limited or taken from you at the whim of some other company in some other country.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    People go to a gov website when they know they need to get information or get something done. Social media is a way to push information out about new policies etc. Governments have whole departments dedicated to getting the word out about things because people aren't all in one place. This is not a big additional effort but it is different in two essential way: They control it, and it has APIs anyone can connect to, including to bridge elsewhere.
  - bob-09 3y ago
    You can ask citizens to go to your website to stay informed, but they will turn around and complain that nobody told them about X,Y,Z because they're not naturally going to the website on a regular basis unless they have an immediate need. Elected officials will turn on you and blame you for not meeting the citizens where they already are.
    - WeylandYutani 3y ago
      Public broadcasting exists in Europe. In fact they were established precisely for this purpose all the way back before internet in the 1930s. Really you don't need Twitter to stay informed- very few people actually follow government tweets and most of them are journalists.
  - FireInsight 3y ago
    Well, usually governments don't just have one website. Different entities use different channels for official communications + Twitter which is the one everyone reads. Why not have a governments official mastodon for the governments official communication interoperable with the network everyone else is on?
  - tremon 3y ago
    Why can't the government website not have a widget/subpage showing the latest Mastodon posts?
izzydata 3y ago
If I had to guess it is because it is already developed, in a format people can already understand and is dynamically configurable to do what they want now and could change in the future.
AndrewDucker 3y ago
Think of it like RSS, but for tiny updates. You'd visit the site to do website type of things, but you don't want to visit daily in case there's an update.
mr_mitm 3y ago
Hosting mastodon instances costs money. It makes sense that the "digital town square" is at least partially funded and maintained by the public, i.e. the government.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  Commodity small mastodon instance hosting is modestly priced, compared to large org budgets https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
cmelbye 3y ago
The advantage is that the information can be aggregated along with posts from other sources rather than having to visit many different websites individually. It's easier to consume, the same reason why RSS was useful.
- gochi 3y ago
  This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are constantly splitting themselves around different social networks. So this just becomes "if you're a twitter user it's easier than RSS". Yet you still have to create another account to join the fediverse, then another for threads, then another for facebook, list goes on for each network that pops up and gains usage.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    There is also RSS. https://www.government.nl/rss https://www.government.nl/rss Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. It has to be “all of the above” because no one method of distribution captures everybody
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      > Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. I can agree with that. Interesting to see social network reach in the Netherlands: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-networks-netherlands/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-n... Meta rules the top 4 spots.
  - cmelbye 3y ago
    That’s the hard part about standards. I’m not sure how a standard can become one without people taking a chance on it. Case in point: You actually do not need to create another account on Threads - it interoperates with this standard. Citizens will be able to follow information from the Dutch government on that platform.
    - gochi 3y ago
unshavedyak 3y ago
It's just an alternate implementation of RSS / push notifications / etc. A "twitter feed" is just a website and propagation of posts, comments to posts, etc. Right?
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Yeah and you can implement ActivityPub without using Mastodon, if they want to. So you could have something that looks more like WordPress (or actually is, but hopefully not), but is compatible with the "fediverse" ecosystem. And RSS, of course
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
If you publish on a website, discussion about what you posted happens in a fragmented way across the various social sites (like we're doing here). If you publish on a social site you're saying "let's talk about this here". Conversations about what you posted might spring up elsewhere, but they become secondary. That's desirable if you want to have a moment when you're done addressing all of the comments.
vanilla_nut 3y ago
No strong reason, but Mastodon allows various goverment officials and agencies to create accounts on the same server and probably has more functionality baked in than most self-hosted alternatives. It's got a better interface than a CMS and even allows those government officials to follow and interact with other accounts in an official capacity. Personally it feels ready-made for government presence on the web.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Wordpress for one to many.
  - heavenlyblue 3y ago
    How would your average user "follow" several wordpress websites aggregated in a single timeline?
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      RSS? I imagine ActivityPub is the Mastodon analogy.
rsynnott 3y ago
Very few people are going to bother going to the Dutch government's website every day to see what's going on with the Dutch government. They might be sufficiently interested to follow an account or two. I follow a couple of the European Commission's accounts (they also have a Mastodon instance), and occasionally find them interesting; I certainly can't see myself regularly going to the EC's horrible website, tho.
- hidelooktropic 3y ago
  Yes. And very few still are going to adopt RSS software and a life workflow to check it only to approximate the aggregation feature already a first class feature of a social media platform. Let's remember the general public are not the same users as "us"
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Yes, a website with an RSS feed is the most basic thing the government should use for communication. This also avoids the question of who to peer with. Anyone can request the RSS feed.
- DavideNL 3y ago
  Mastodon also provides an rss feed. “You can follow any Mastodon account via RSS by just adding ".rss" to the end of the account's public profile URL.” https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456 https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
DavideNL 3y ago
It _is_ also a website, hosted by themselves: https://social.overheid.nl/public/local https://social.overheid.nl/public/local
galaxyLogic 3y ago
Mastodon is a website, which is well-suited for discussion and broadcasting. Yes you could create a website and often the agencies do also that - for presenting more static information. But Mastodon etc. already solve the problem of discussion and "following" some specific party or "thread". A conventional web-site is good for distributing static information whereas a social media site is good for broadcasting notifications about CHANGES to that (more static) information.
madeofpalk 3y ago
what is a mastodon instance if not "a website"?
rakoo 3y ago
Same as tv vs social networks: communication can be bidirectional, and a specific news can be shared and discussed more easily
hidelooktropic 3y ago
What advantage do citizens get by needing to know and personally keep the individual websites for their govt comms Or rely on each website to format the messages in consistently good UX, typography, etc. Or lose the ability to discover those updates through social network concepts like hashtags Or have to employ their own RSS tools and subscriptions to approximate the aggregation already baked into mastodon et al Or remove the ability to see conversations between government entities natively supported by @ mentions.
nerdbert 3y ago
I am not going to go to 41 different government agency websites every day just to see if they want to tell me something important. But I will follow them on social media so that I can see all their updates in one place.

vidarh 3y ago

You can see from the fact that there are replies from other instances that they do federate. It'd make little sense not to, as if they didn't people wouldn't be able to follow them.

seti0Cha 3y ago
Do they federate with anybody or are they selective? Who makes those decisions, based on what? This seems like a can of worms to me.
- vidarh 3y ago
  I'm not sure which part of federation it is that makes you think there's a reason for them to be selective. The "worst case" scenario is that people on this instance can follow someone undesirable and so that they end up with undesirable content in the local feed. But that's pretty much down to ensuring users act how they otherwise would on any social media, with the expectation it will be seen by the public. I'm a bit surprised that they allow public access to the federated view of the server [1], because that does mean it potentially could get embarrassing w/respect to people who don't get that the gov. doesn't choose what ends up there, so I'd bet that eventually ends up locked down. [1] https://social.overheid.nl/public https://social.overheid.nl/public
  - seti0Cha 3y ago
    That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take.
    - nobody9999 3y ago
      >That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take. I'm not clear on what you mean by "forced to choose which side to take." You (or anyone else) don't have to have an account on that instance. In fact IIUC, the site linked in the submission only has accounts for the Dutch government and elected officials of that government. Folks other than that can follow individual accounts on the Dutch government instance, but aren't subject to any moderation decisions made by the site. Only those with accounts on that instance would be affected by blocks/bans of specific users or instances. And even if the Dutch government instance wants to block other instances from their users, there's nothing stopping Dutch government officials (and/or agencies) from creating accounts on other instances. As such, please explain what you mean by "choosing a side." I'd expect that this site is on the side of The Netherlands, its government and citizens. Isn't that the way it should be for a site like this? As such, please explain what you mean. Edit: Clarified prose. Fixed typo.

callalex 3y ago

It terrifies me how many USA cities and counties use Twitter for their mass emergency broadcasts, since Twitter has now proven itself to be unreliable for even reads. My city pays a company (Nixle) to send out mass SMS and Email, but all it contains is a link to a tweet instead of any actionable information.

RF_Savage 3y ago
That must have been frustrating when twitter went behind a login wall.

stainablesteel 3y ago

> It always felt wrong to me that Twitter was used for anything resembling official communication i've come to disagree with this now that community notes have come into play, it makes twitter the best place for them to communicate if they're trying to show their honesty and sincerity